Professional Documents
Culture Documents
What can I know? (metaphysics) What ought I to do? (morals) What may I hope? (religion) What is a person? (anthropology)
Neoliberalism as the fetishisation of instrumental reason rationalisation, accounting: productivity Closing of the gap between the real and the real (or why semiotics and Foucauldian analysis does not open a new political space)
A politics beginning from bare life? Petri dish modernity and instrumental reason: why creativity/grace necessary
Napier argues that the dominant premise of modern life is that we survive through the recognition and elimination of nonself , which leads to the erroneous expectation that change should not be painful and the equally unacceptable idea that otherness can be celebrated at an appropriate or politically correct distance, or conversely by virtue of an assumed and unearned familiarity (Napier 2003:xxiii).
I.e. if you did not find this subject traumatizing I have failed as a teacher and Culture fest is a celebration of sameness and the destruction of difference
Potluck dinner: Everyone brings a different dish but we all eat by the same rules Enforced multiculturalism is a foil for never engaging difference, for never having to engage with someone who might actually be the catalyst for real change
If it isnt already dead, put it in a museum to kill it and keep it dead, quarantining it from life
Modernity is a process of devouring the periphery (destroying difference), and hence the ability for both change and creativity We celebrate indigeneity and human rights after the populations have been pacified (conquered) Environmentalism becomes popular at the moment when all parts of the globe are affected by industrial capitalism the scheme whereby the soul of the unknown or unknowable is destroyed, and its corpse tamed and revivified, is fairly consistent (Napier 2003:6).
The very problem of taking an enactive approach seriously, putting development in the middle of being
social and psychogenic shock where peripheral circulation shuts down in an attempt to salvage blood for the brain in the form of narratives of transformation that society values most, and where the subtle negotiation of our boundaries gives way, first, to a preservation of the bodys core, but eventually to the production of its own pathogens, to its own anaphylaxis (Napier 7).
Immunology, as the dominant paradigm of modernity, is a symptom of the dumbing down that we have allowed to dominate our creative inclinations Immunological view of the world, Napier argues, depends on innovation at the expense of creativity (invention), it is paranoid of difference, which is why our age, despite population growth and many more educated people, produces less not more big ideas, Edisons, Einsteins and Bells
Lab science concerned with reverse engineering rather than considering life as creative process
Napier contrasts Balinese cultivation of otherness to Western immunisation against difference Balinese ritual engages otherness to provide some knowledge of the foreign, for us otherness just needs to be destroyed (ie culture fest, museums, etc) Dealing with demons and spirits as basis for new metaphors much more likely to offer the world revised metaphors of immunological or viral transformation than we ourselves are (Napier 31)
A world in which individuals wander in search of anothers experience to appropriate and be empowered by or where they merely follow the sgnposted footpaths set out by previous travelers will necessarily lack the sensitivities that ritual creatively depends on. Here the sin of ignorance has the effect of killing off, even unknowingly, the very difference, the diversity, that is publicly heralded.
Such a world, where difference is diffused into an agreeable clone has formally, categorically, and indeed truly achieved an autoimmunological state, where so-called self-awareness has the effect of producing ontological ignorance, and where an increasing focus on interiority starves both the other and the self . Does this cultural autoimmunity, which is now so much a part of cosmopolitan life, signal something of a twilight of the Enlightenment? Well, how could things be otherwise? (Napier 2003:37).
Reinventing history is the only creative way of achieving transcendence Critique of deconstructivist thought: Way out of barbershop of mirrors of theories about theories that just reproduce the Enlightenment they critique Zizek: importance of hermeneutics, ability to tell a story: grounding theory of politically possible to lived experience, keeping the gap of thought open (from total ideological closure)
Critique of Dawkins & Wilsons use of war and fraud metephors does not dissolve with shift to network view of human being: agency of system without morality results in schizoid hysteria
Tension between evolution and revolution: saltation is always possible, Darwin did not arrive at his ideas in an evolutionary way
Insight is a different order to evolution
Without the moral connections that allow for intentionally risky experimentation beyond the network for, say creating love rather than oppression networkers themselves have little awareness of the consequences of what they do their disinterest in looking at anything or attending to anyone not obviously powerful renders them incapable of understanding the mechanism of change In short, networkers suck energy from existing relations because they do not know how to create energy, and they replace the reality of their own stasis with a language of supposed change (Napier 173).
Cybernetics
Cybernetics: the science of cause, effect, feedback... homeostasis, selforganisation, complex adaptive systems, non-linear dynamics, circuits, information: differences that make a difference Schismogenesis: Competitive: arms race Complementary: dominance and succouring Bali as a steady state: homeostasis across social systems
Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded up at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start half way up the stick? But these are nonsense questions (Bateson 1972:459).
Minimum criteria of mind: The system shall operate with and upon differences Thee system shall consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted (What is transmitted on a neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference) Many events within the system shall be energised by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies trial and error.
The unit of mind is being-environment: relationship This is the same unit as that of evolutionary survival MIND IS NOT THING BUT RELATIONSHIP
The unit of information theory is difference. The unit of psychological input is difference.
of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of reason
(1972:129).
Pathologies of epistemology
Totemism: empathy with the non-human world, metaphors for understanding human world Animism: Mind of human as metaphor for non-human world: extending human mind into non-human things But when you separate mind from the structure in which it is imminent, such as human relationship, the human society or the ecosystem, you thereby embark, i believe, on fundamental error, which in the end will surely hurt you (1972: 485).
This line of thinking gets developed in Rappaports opus Ritual and religion in the making of humankind. Rappaport and Bateson are each here drawing on William James (purposive reason as necessarily harmful): homeostatic approach to consciousness
If we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sicences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life. The solution that [Mead] offers is that we look for the direction, and values implicit in the means, rather than looking ahead to a blueprinted goal and thinking of this goal as justifying manipulative means (1972:160)
That is the sort of world we live in a world of circuit structures and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.
Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little art so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen (1979:142).
What Bateson was stepping towards was the collapsing of spirit and matter. These have not yet been collapsed. There has not been a paradigm shift in Western epistemology, or in the damage that purposive reason brings, even when we apply it to solve questions of ecology: mental health and climate change.
So how can the process of recreating humanity and society begin? Art, by becoming a true avant-garde, can provide new ways of seeing, being and understanding. It can point the way out of limitations of the present, and help create an enlightened citizenry capable of creating and maintaining a just and rational social structure (Krause 2011:93).
This social organism is so ill that it is absolutely high time to subject it to radical treatment, otherwise humanity will go under. And our social organism exists like a living being in a condition of the severest illness (Beuys in Harlan 2007:21-2). Beuys sees art as the ultimate form of capital because it represents the ability to create and invent. Art is capital. This is not some pipe dream; it is reality. In other words, capital is what art is. Capital is human capacity and what flows from it. So there are only two organs involved here, or two polar relationships: creativity and human intention, from which a product arises. These are the real economic values, nothing else. Money is not. However, we have a concept of capital where an economic value intervenes and wrecks everything, which therefore makes the economy revolve around profit, exploitation, etc. (Beuys in Harlan 2007:27).
Dewey defines art as a particular type of experience. He distinguishes experience (flow) from an experience. Experience is the result of evolving organism environment relationships. An experience is a moment of equilibrium, which sets of new struggles and relationships, and momentary equilibriums, .
form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached (Dewey 1980:14). A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation (Dewey 1980:35).
Dewey defines art in terms of what it does (i.e. creates an experience) rather than what art is (i.e. some relation of form and content). Krause gives the following as examples of an experience: A political campaign carried to a satisfying conclusion, or a conversation that brings definition to a formerly vague idea, may be so experientially similar to successful artworks that these things may as well be deemed a form of art (Krause 2011:27). All of these experiences organise the materials of the world into a stable, finished form with an aesthetic quality.
Beuyss notion of social sculpting is the ultimate art form, a social gesamtkuntswerk (total artwork) that reshapes society in such a way as to utilise uptapped artistic abilities of everyone to create new political structures.
Both acts, creation and appreciation, occur within the flow of life, through it, because of it, and interaction with it. Art is the conversion of objective material into an intense and clear experience that occurs within the larger context of the interchange between the organism and environment (Krause 2011:25). Deweys locating of art in an experience places the processes of creation and appreciation back within daily flows of experience, and emphasises that, whether in art or other domains of life, brings about the emergence of new forms of form and order.
We can measure the waste of artistic talent not only in the thousands of failed artists artists whose market failure is necessary to the success of the few but also in the millions whose creative potential is never touched (Duncan 1983:172).
Granted, creating a realm for artistic practice beyond the confines of the marketplace is indeed a difficult proposition. It will involve completely rethinking the role and function of the arts. Cultural institutions that operate on a human scale and create art divorced from business motives will need to exist (Krause 2011:73). Krause argues that reimagining art in the flow of life, as Beuys and Dewey did, would take us to reimagining progress in art, and the degree to which political institutions respond to needs on a human scale.